Not even close to Pynchon

[Richard Romeo]

That may be the case, innocence and youth, but geez let’s not throw the baby out with the bath water. It’s a core emotion and the engine for much of great art.
Is that why so much art today is obvious boring and cryptic?

rich



> On Apr 9, 2020, at 9:31 AM, ish mailian <ishmailian at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> This attachment to innocence and youth, is ubiquitous in american art,
> and with few exceptions (Henry James comes to mind) is at the heart of
> American prose fiction, in the so-called novel, and is not something
> america can grow up and out of  on this side of paradise. Zoyd, of
> course, is Slothroplike, childish and innocent,  but is, because it's
> 1984, though no Big Brother totalitarianism but rather Neoliberal
> torments him, a working class male trying to raise a daughter in his
> hippie hair and dress. Like Jim and Huck, naked on the raft, he floats
> past the flotsam of what is left in Gatsby's wake, avoiding the shore
> as the trees cleared for Gatsby's mansion are clear cut on the other
> side of Vinland the Good, Zoyd, a member of the Multitude (Spinozian),
> can only partake in the picnic of old lefties and young mutants.
> 
> 
>> On Thu, Apr 9, 2020 at 9:11 AM ish mailian <ishmailian at gmail.com> wrote:
>> 
>> That's a different point. One I agree with too. As Pynchon notes in
>> his Introduction to Slow Learner, the American male is a foreveryoung,
>> a boy who won't grow up, who won't even try, a Peter in Panland,
>> because, like Huck, like Ishmael, like countless others in American
>> culture, he rejects the adult world and all its corruption.
>> 
>> from Death of Adulthood in American Culture
>> 
>> By A.O. Scott
>> 
>> NYT   Sept. 11, 2014
>> 
>> 
>> We Americans have never been all that comfortable with patriarchy in
>> the strict sense of the word. The men who established our political
>> independence — guys who, for the most part, would be considered late
>> adolescents by today’s standards (including Benjamin Franklin (fig.
>> 3), in some ways the most boyish of the bunch) — did so partly in
>> revolt against the authority of King George III, a corrupt,
>> unreasonable and abusive father figure. It was not until more than a
>> century later that those rebellious sons became paternal symbols in
>> their own right. They weren’t widely referred to as Founding Fathers
>> until Warren Harding, then a senator, used the phrase around the time
>> of World War I.
>> 
>> Surveying the canon of American literature in his magisterial “Love
>> and Death in the American Novel,” Leslie A. Fiedler suggested, more
>> than half a century before Ruth Graham, that “the great works of
>> American fiction are notoriously at home in the children’s section of
>> the library.” Musing on the legacy of Rip Van Winkle and Huckleberry
>> Finn (fig. 4), he broadened this observation into a sweeping (and
>> still very much relevant) diagnosis of the national personality: “The
>> typical male protagonist of our fiction has been a man on the run,
>> harried into the forest and out to sea, down the river or into combat
>> — anywhere to avoid ‘civilization,’ which is to say the confrontation
>> of a man and woman which leads to the fall to sex, marriage and
>> responsibility. One of the factors that determine theme and form in
>> our great books is this strategy of evasion, this retreat to nature
>> and childhood which makes our literature (and life!) so charmingly and
>> infuriatingly ‘boyish.’ ”
>> 
>> Huck Finn is for Fiedler the greatest archetype of this impulse, and
>> he concludes “Love and Death” with a tour de force reading of Twain’s
>> masterpiece. What Fiedler notes, and what most readers of “Huckleberry
>> Finn” will recognize, is Twain’s continual juxtaposition of Huck’s
>> innocence and instinctual decency with the corruption and hypocrisy of
>> the adult world.
>> 
>>> On Thu, Apr 9, 2020 at 8:49 AM Ian Livingston <igrlivingston at gmail.com> wrote:
>>> 
>>> I was with you, ish, up to the part about america being old. This is a very young nation, run by kids that never grew up for kids who will never grow up. It is a children's den of self-centered babies who want either to be the biggest bully on the block, or to escape to a place where there are no parents who insist they behave like sapient humans.
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